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What woman, believing and knowing, as far as anything can be known, her husband to be dead and fast buried, is likely to accept even the idea of his possible escape from the tomb! Not one! else the disconsolate widows would indeed have reason to be more inconsolable than they appear! When I left her that morning I found Andrea Luziani waiting for me at my hotel.
I approached the nearest gendarme and slipped a five-franc piece into his hand. "May one speak?" I asked, carelessly. The man hesitated. "For one instant, signor. But be brief." I addressed the brigand in a low clear-tone. "Have you any message for one Andrea Luziani? I am a friend of his." He looked at me and a dark smile crossed his features. "Andrea is a good soul.
As soon as they were out of sight, the merry Andrea capered on his deck like a child in a play-ground, and snapped his fingers defiantly. "Per Bacco!" he cried, ecstatically, "they should as soon make a priest tell confessional secrets, as force me, honest Andrea Luziani, to betray a man who has given me good cigars! Let them run back to Gaeta and hunt in every hole and corner!
"We received information," he said, in precise, business-like tones, "that Neri escaped from Gaeta two months since, and was aided and abetted in his escape by one Andrea Luziani, owner of the coasting brig 'Laura, journeying for purposes of trade between Naples and Palermo. You are Andrea Luziani, and this is the brig 'Laura, we are right in this; is it not so?"
"Not I, eccellenza," he replied, with an air of dignity and most virtuous honesty. "No, no, not now. The law is the law, and I, Andrea Luziani, am not one to break it. No, Carmelo must take his punishment; it is for life they say and hard as it seems, it is but just.
In time to come, so I mused, this very boy might learn to set his song about the "beloved" to a sterner key, and might find it meet, not to be slain himself, but to slay HER! Such a thing in Naples was more than probable. By and by the dance ceased, and I recognized in one of the breathless, laughing sailors my old acquaintance Andrea Luziani, with whom I had sailed to Palermo.
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